


Alfie - Best Laid Plans (prompt)

by wysiwygot



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Canon Jewish Character, Gen, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 23:38:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16942902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wysiwygot/pseuds/wysiwygot
Summary: Why did it seem the whole of bloody London wanted Alfie Solomons to settle down? Picture that: with a wife and a gaggle of kids, the house in the country and that whole lot? A dog at his heels, flowers for the missus, bread and salt at shabbos.That’s not him, though, is it? That ain’t who he is. All right, maybe the dog and the bit about the bread, but come on: He’s a fucking soldier, ain’t he?





	Alfie - Best Laid Plans (prompt)

**Author's Note:**

> A short thing, written for the prompt given to me by AO3 user TheAstronomer: Alfie Solomons fails to get laid

Why did it seem the whole of bloody London wanted Alfie Solomons to settle down? Picture that: with a wife and a gaggle of kids, the house in the country and that whole lot? A dog at his heels, flowers for the missus, bread and salt at shabbos.

That’s not him, though, is it? That ain’t who he is. All right, maybe the dog and the bit about the bread, but come on: He’s a fucking soldier, ain’t he?

Talk to him for five minutes and he’d tell you himself: He’s damned. Not exactly marriage material. Damned, mate. 

What does being damned even mean, for a Jew like him? Damned to what? Sure ain’t Arthur’s fire-and-brimstone hell, the next world. Alfie’s about as likely to burn for eternity in that oil painting as he would be reincarnated into a bloody piglet. (Which would serve him right after bungling the keeping kosher in his younger days.) Some Jews do believe in heaven and hell as the goys of London saw it, yeah, but you know the gag, don’t you? Ask two Jews, get three opinions.

Maybe his sentence to hell was already being served there on earth. Maybe it was to live in the body he’d been issued: that persistent coughing from the gas exposure in France; so far-sighted that he swore he could see into the future; his sciatica plaguing him if he so much as skipped a midday walk or slept on his side; and his bloody psoriasis, bursting out his skin like actual biblical torment every time he caught a draft. Ever worn a tzitzit whilst a skin condition covers half your back? If that’s not hell, don’t know what is.

What about heaven, then? Eternal rest? No fuckin’ thank you, cheers though. Not for Alfie. Sounds bloody boring. Anyway, Alfie liked his work. He was good at it, and business was thriving. Why should he take a rest, in this life or the next?

Maybe—maybe—he could squash the whole “I’m damned” bit long enough to take a wife if all the evil Alfie’d done had been under the generous umbrella of wartime desperation. What’s a little war crime between soldiers, right? That thing about the six-inch nail up the nostril of that Italian bloke? That was the truth. Was he required to kill the man? Yes, bound by duty. Did he need to put his own personal flourish on it like he did? No. No he did not. Did he take pleasure in it? Fuckin’ hell right, he did. Not exactly something you bandy about with the gents during mikvah.

It was what Alfie done as a gangster that had him well and truly damned. For those of keeping track of drek like that. In his volatile formative years in the business, and his brutal and unhinged moments even as king of the mountain, he knew that his affronts had him damned—body, spirit and all.

Alfie even got a tattoo of a crown right on his hand, right where everyone and their rabbi could see it, because he didn’t give a plague-ridden rat’s arse who knew it: Alfie Solomons was a bad Jew.

Says who? Leviticus, mate. And a bunch of other ancient blokes with long beards who probably wouldn’t have lasted three fuckin’ minutes in Camden Town. Best stay away, that’s what the crown on his hand meant.

Which brings us back to everyone and their nursemaid wanting Alfie to settle down and enjoy a quiet life. Didn’t seem bloody likely. There would be no direct heir to the Solomons fortune, which was fine by Alfie, seeing as he planned to spend every last bit of said fortune. What he couldn’t spend, he’d leave to his sister, who’d need it to keep a brute like her boy Goliath in pies. Fair enough, considering how much money Goliath had brought him.

All in all, it was a bunch of old bats, the hordes of mumes and bubbes, acting as shadchans with all the parading about of their nieces and daughters and granddaughters in front of the well-off Camden Jewry. Plenty of more above board, observant Jews that were better off than Alfie, to be sure, so those fucks got their pick of the nicest Jewish girls right off. Started filling those bellies up with babies while Alfie worked hard to build up his bakery business. No matter. You know what babies and wives represented to to him? Vulnerabilities, mate. Points of weakness to be exploited by his enemies.

A wife, then, was not to be his keeper. But a man still has needs, yeah, don’t he? He was, at his core, a fucking Sodomite, after all … meaning that he’d stuck it in without the intention of making a child. Not that he was bent. He liked a clean young girl just as much as the next bloke, if that next bloke weren’t funny.

The problem was this: Damned though he was, the girls Alfie took to bed had to be Jewish, through and through. A good, practicing Jewish girl, at that. If not good, then at least practicing. But one look at his tattoo and the sores on his skin, even the ugliest of the orthodox girls set up by the shadchan turned their nose up at him.

That left Alfie with only a few options when he had the time or inclination to dip his wick: them that would have him. A couple of sad widows, when they felt up to it and didn’t ask for more; the saucy plump wife of a business associate, once, when she was acting out; an errant nafka, when he could find one. Ah, a nafka. Do you know how hard it is to find a whore that fit the bloody bill? That’s two things to hide from the average Londoner, depending on who was asking: whoring and Judaism. So much for “good” or “practicing”—in the event of a sexual famine, Alfie would settle for “Jewish” and “female.” Must be discreet, must accept small bills and nah, sweetie, psoriasis ain’t contagious.

Once Alfie did happen across a woman who’d fit at least two of those four essential requirements—and was herself willing and able, even knowing his reputation as Camden Town’s finest manufacturer of baked goods, thumb on the nose—they were more often than not poxy old slags with almost nothing left to lose. Did the trick, good for a laugh, but Alfie tried not to make a habit out of it. A man had to have his standards, didn’t he?


End file.
